Category: reason

“This judge, jury, executioner thing—where they’re just tearing this girl’s life apart and diving into her parents and her parents’ voting record,” said Chris Harrison, the long-suffering host of ABC’s The Bachelor franchise, in an interview last week about cancel culture. “It’s unbelievably alarming to watch this.”

Or perhaps I should say that he was the host of the dating game-show, which debuted with him as Master of Ceremonies nearly 20 years ago. He has since been canceled for the above remarks—in other words, for saying we should wait for the facts and show a little mercy when deciding how to proceed in the face of online claims leveled against one of the show’s contestants.

The controversy goes something like this: In a viral Tiktok, an alleged former classmate of Rachael Kirkconnell, a frontrunner on this season’s competition, posed a question. “Girlieee, remember when you bullied me in high school for liking black guys???” That was certainly inconvenient for Kirkconnell, who is currently on national television dating Matt James, the franchise’s first black bachelor.

Next came the customary uprooting of every supposedly unsavory detail about her life. A 60-second TikTok by @feministmama parsed through it all: Kirkconnell liking an Instagram photo with a woman wearing a MAGA hat, pictures of her costumed in American Indian attire, social media posts in support of law enforcement. As Harrison mentioned above, the user also dedicated a big chunk to Kirkconnell’s dad’s voting history and political involvement, as if she is somehow responsible for that. (I was under the impression that we don’t define women by the decisions made by their fathers and husbands.)

Then came the pictures of Kirkconnell at a 2018 Antebellum-themed fraternity party thrown by Kappa Alpha Order at Georgia College and State University, where students gathered on a plantation in Old South debutante-esque attire. The theme is beyond distasteful. Indeed, I’ve written over and over and over again that such displays are offensive. But no one knows whether Kirkconnell even understood the cultural significance of the event when she attended it as a college student, nor did anyone wait for her response before concluding she should be banished from public life.

“It’s 2021,” concludes @feministmama in that viral video. “Let’s hold public figures accountable for their actions.”

Kirkconnell is not running for president. She is not even running for the town council, or for the local school board. She is a contestant on a trashy dating competition where the most influence she’ll have over public life is which products she may choose to endorse on Instagram, should anyone still want to work with her. It is a bit rich that anyone would devote such energy to cancelling contestants on The Bachelor, of all things, considering that the show thrives on bringing out the worst aspects of its cast members in order to maximize that reality TV drama.

“I would say that you have to be really careful about what you are doing on social media,” said James, the Bachelor himself, in a conversation with Entertainment Tonight. “Rumors are dark and nasty and can ruin people’s lives. So I would give people the benefit of the doubt, and hopefully [Rachael] will have her time to speak on that.”

But the controversy is no longer even about Kirkconnell: It is Harrison, who is not credibly accused of participating or abetting racist behavior at all, who faces cancellation.

“I haven’t heard Rachael speak on this yet, and until I actually hear this woman have a chance to speak, who am I to say any of this?” he told Rachel Lindsay, the franchise’s first black Bachelorette. “I saw a picture of her at a sorority party five years ago, and that’s it. I’m not defending Rachael [Kirkconnell]—I just know that 50 million people who did that in 2018. That was a type of party that a lot of people went to.”

He continued: “My guess? These girls got dressed and went to a party and had a great time. They were 18-years-old. Does that make it okay? I don’t know, Rachel [Lindsay], you tell me…but where is this lens we’re holding up and was that lens available and were we all looking through it in 2018?'”

That lens is constantly changing. And, in a big way, it should—society has a knack for sharpening broad consensus on morality and justice as hindsight kicks in. But often that justice is retroactive, and it increasingly leaves no room for apologies.

Harrison is trying anyway. After releasing an initial apology, he agreed to step aside on Saturday. “To the Black community, to the BIPOC community: I am so sorry,” he said in a groveling statement posted on Instagram. “My words were harmful. I am listening, and I truly apologize for my ignorance and any pain it caused you. The historic season of The Bachelor should not be marred or overshadowed by my mistakes or diminished by my actions. To that end, I have consulted with Warner Bros. and ABC and will be stepping aside for a period of time and will not join for the After the Final Rose special.”

To sum things up: Merely objecting to the speed and fairness of someone else’s cancellation is now itself grounds for canceling. What will the next standard be?

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On this week’s edition of The Reason Roundtable, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie shout about Trump’s second acquittal, Biden’s latest managerial pushes, and the CDC’s flop of a school-reopening rollout.

Discussed in the show:

2:27 What did we learn from impeachment?
18:53 “Bidenomics.”
42:02 School re-openings.
47:35 Weekly Listener Question: Should people be granted courtesies that they themselves are not willing to reciprocate?
50:50 Media recommendations for the week.

This week’s links:

• “Journalists Worried About People Having Conversations on Clubhouse,” by Liz Wolfe
• “GOP tries to weaponize pandemic-exhausted parents against Biden,” by Christopher Cadelago and Natasha Korecki
• “Biden Is Still Separating Families at the Border. Where Is the Media Outrage?” by Billy Binion
• “Rep. Peter Meijer: Only GOP Freshman Who Voted To Impeach Trump Tells All,” by Nick Gillespie (podcast)
• “CDC’s New ‘Reopening’ Guidance Will Keep Schools Closed in the Fall,” by Matt Welch
• “The Biden Team Wants to Transform the Economy. Really.” by Noam Scheiber

Send your questions either by email to roundtable@reason.com or by voicemail to 213-973-3017. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.

Today’s sponsors:

• Get an up-close look at the history of the Constitution with the Institute for Justice’s new podcast, Bound by Oath. Available wherever you check out podcasts.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Assistant production by Regan Taylor.
Music: “Angeline,” by The Brothers Steve.

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I grew up in New York City, went to college in Central Pennsylvania, and clerked in Western Pennsylvania. I am very familiar with cold weather. And, growing up, I remember many New Yorkers would laugh when an inch of snow shut down a southern city. How could it be that these people cannot handle a little bit of ice, they would say? Why can’t they drive? Here, I’ll provide a helpful guide for cynical northerners to understand cold weather.

Maintaining preparedness for cold weather is expensive. And places with warmer climates can reasonably decide to avoid those costs.

First, in advance of a snow storm, sand and salt trucks have to treat the roads. Sand and salt, which must be maintained in advance of winter, are not free. Southern cities, budget conscious as always, do not need to maintain mounds of salt and sand. Snowstorms occur once in a blue moon. And when there is such a snowstorm, it is simpler to shut the city down for a day until the snow melts. I suspect even the most seasoned driver, with a 4×4 vehicle, would be unable to drive on an untreated road.

Second, up north, homes tend to have natural gas or oil-based heating. Even if the power goes out, the house stays warm. Moreover, northern homes are more likely to have functional fireplaces. Not here. When the power goes out, there is no heat, and no means to cook. At the present moment, my home has power. Fortunately, the power in my neighborhood has not cut off. It is warm here. And family friends without power are staying with us. Alas, we do not have running water. Why?

Third, homes in the north tend to insulate their pipes. But in cities where the temperature almost never dips below freezing, that cost can be avoided. Moreover, pipes can be built entirely below ground, or partially above ground. The former option is more costly, but avoids freezing. The latter option, which is cheaper, could lead to freezing. Again, small decisions that could save money become problematic with once-in-a-generation cold snaps.

At my college, classes were cancelled on Monday and Tuesday, and will be cancelled tomorrow as well. It is not possible to hold Zoom classes because half of the city is without power. Please pray for the people of Texas, and elsewhere.

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Former President Donald Trump’s trade war sank American manufacturing exports and inadvertently helped shift automaking jobs to China as carmakers, including BMW and Tesla, responded to new uncertainty in global supply chains by moving more manufacturing across the Pacific.

That’s just one of the ways that Trump’s trade war and “phase one” agreement with China, signed a year ago, seem to have backfired, according to a recent report published by the Peterson Institute of International Economics (PIIE), a trade policy think tank based in Washington, D.C. As President Joe Biden considers which of his predecessor’s trade policies to roll back and which to maintain, the report suggests that Trump’s tariffs have done significant damage to the very sectors of the economy they were supposed to help.

Chad Bown, a senior fellow at PIIE and the report’s author, notes that China had become the second-largest export market for American-made cars by 2017, the last full year before Trump’s trade war began. After a series of tit-for-tat tariff increases between the U.S. and China, however, American automotive exports to China fell by more than one-third. Higher tariffs on imported car parts from China raised costs for automakers in America, while China’s retaliatory tariffs on American-made cars hiked prices and reduced demand in China.

To avoid those costs and to evade increased uncertainty, some carmakers began shifting their supply chains—but not in the direction the White House was hoping.

BMW, for example, shifted much of the production of its X3 sport-utility vehicle from Spartanburg, South Carolina, to China after reporting that tariffs had cut the company’s American profits by about $338 million in 2018. The higher costs imposed by the trade war caused Tesla to announce that it was “accelerating construction” of a new plant in Shanghai.

Overall, the number of American automating jobs peaked in September 2018, just a couple of months after Trump’s trade war began, and then declined during 2019 and 2020.

The signing of the “phase one” trade deal with China did little to stop or reverse those shifts. Even though China pledged to increase its purchases of American-made vehicles and car parts as part of the agreement, exports are still lagging well behind their pre-trade war totals, according to the PIIE report.

“The U.S. auto sector provides an excellent illustration of how even temporary trade war tariffs can inflict long-term damage,” Bown concludes.

It’s also a good microcosm for understanding why Trump’s trade war didn’t achieve its stated goal of reducing America’s trade deficit with China, and why the Biden administration would be wise to abolish those tariffs as soon as possible.

Trump believed that hiking tariffs would reduce America’s imports from China, allowing the gap between the value of those imports and the value of America’s exports to fall. What he failed to grasp, however, is that many of those imports—especially when it comes to manufactured goods—are materials necessary for making the items that American companies end up exporting back to China: like cars.

Higher costs imposed on imports ended up slowing American exports—and thus the trade deficit actually grew. Meanwhile, companies could avoid the cost of Trump’s tariffs by shifting production out of the United States, and some chose to do that.

Biden, so far, seems unwilling to remove Trump’s tariffs. By announcing a misguided “Buy American” policy for government procurement, Biden is also expanding on some of the Trump administration’s protectionist manufacturing policies.

If the past few years are any indication, all Biden will likely accomplish by this is to further erode America’s industrial base by trading away automaking jobs in exchange for the appearance of “toughness.”

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Sen. Mitt Romney (R–Utah) spent the last several years at the forefront of the unofficial anti-Trump conservative coalition on Capitol Hill. In his latest turn, however, he is taking a cue from the populist Trumpian policy agenda, announcing a proposed increase to the federal minimum wage.

There’s a catch. “I’m introducing a bill with @SenTomCotton that would increase the minimum wage,” tweeted Romney, “while ensuring businesses cannot hire illegal immigrants. We must protect American workers.”

Romney added that the proposal “gradually raises the minimum wage without costing jobs, setting it to increase automatically with inflation.”

Members of the GOP have historically rebuffed such efforts, casting them as an economically unsound, one-size-fits-all band-aid that takes away state agency and spurs job losses. The data are on their side: A recent Congressional Budget Office report noted that increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour would lift 900,000 people out of poverty but simultaneously destroy 1.4 million jobs—a metric that was held up as proof positive that Democrats’ recent push to pass that minimum wage increase via budget reconciliation would hurt the people they want to help.

Though the Romney-Cotton bill has yet to be unveiled, how exactly they plan to skirt job losses remains unclear—even if the figure they settle on sits below that magic $15 number. It appears they both believe some of that will be offset by ensuring undocumented immigrants stay unemployed, though that will not help native workers displaced by wages that employers cannot sustain.

What’s more, Romney will be disappointed to find that shutting immigrants out does not “protect American workers” as he claims—something a bipartisan group in the House acknowledged as recently as 2019 when they passed the immigration-friendly Farm Workforce Modernization Act.

“While some worry that these visas displace American workers, U.S. farmers are required by law to offer H-2A positions first to people who can already legally work in the U.S. They seldom find enough takers,” I wrote at the time. “The Cornell Farmworker Program found that dairy farmers rely on undocumented workers because they cannot identify a sufficient amount of U.S.-born employees to fill the positions. This might explain why approximately 50 percent of all farmworkers are undocumented immigrants, according to the Department of Agriculture.”

The immigration component aside, forcing businesses to increase labor costs, especially during a pandemic when many are lucky to keep the lights on, would naturally have a suppressant effect on employment. But the effort is indicative of a relatively new brand forming in some parts of the GOP, made up of traditional rightward social views with a leftward tilt on economic policy. “There are a lot of areas of potential overlap,” Oren Cass, an aide on Romney’s presidential runs in 2008 and 2012, told The New York Times. “There’s a hypothetical governing majority to be drawn around the things we’re talking about that doesn’t exist within either party.”

Cass is now the founder of American Compass, the goal of which is to determine “what the post-Trump right-of-center is going to be.” Romney’s bill is a good example of where that’s headed: a Venn Diagram where the left and the right increasingly see eye to eye on solutions that create more problems than they solve.

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